Is Berlin prepared to support Ukraine’s democratization?

In the light of today’s correlation of forces and interests in Eastern Europe, Germany needs to shape a “new Eastern policy” of sorts. The future German approach could combine a high level of attention to Russia and constant care about the so-called “Intermediate Europe” (Zwischeneuropa), first of all, about Ukraine. To tell the truth, Berlin has long been rife with these opinions. They became topical a few years ago, when the coming of Vladimir Putin to power in Russia caused a political rollback, and were expressed in a number of political and analytical publications. Calls for certain reorientation were sometimes heard in the speeches of those directly involved in this process.

For example, in February 2012 an inter-party group of Eastern Europe-minded politicians made public a joint document on their attitude to Germany’s activity as part of the EU Eastern Partnership at the Berlin-based German Society for Foreign Policy. It emphasizes that this initiative of Brussels is of geostrategic importance for German interests. The inter-party memorandum suggests that a German authorized representative for Eastern Partnership be appointed, partnership countries be given the prospect of EU membership as an instrument that complements Brussels’ policy of neighborhood, and the EU conclude association treaties with such countries as Ukraine, Moldova, and, Georgia (DGAPstandpunkt, 2012, No.1).

As long ago as January 2005, immediately after the Ukrainian “electoral uprising,” the influential German politician Wolfgang Schaeuble, Bundestag deputy CDU/CSU faction leader at the time and Federal Minister of Finance currently, complained in an article that “in its comments on Ukraine’s European prospects, the EU has so far confined itself to the principle of equidistance.” “Now the EU has no right to leave that country to its own devices and must be prepared to induct it into the EU structure one day, provided democracy, a rule-of-law state and a market economy have been established,” Schaeuble noted (FAZ, 2005, January 27). However, these and other similar ideas, which various EU countries’ politicians expressed during and after the Orange Revolution, had no essential effect on either Berlin’s or Brussels’ policy towards Ukraine at the time.

Instead, shortly after this, in February 2005, Ukraine and the EU adopted the so-called Action Plan which the EU had drawn up in the previous year – well before the successful accomplishment of the Orange Revolution later in 2004. The very name of this document – “Action Plan” – was the sign of eyewash on the part of the Western diplomats involved in tackling the problem of Ukraine’s European integration. After the Orange Revolution, they focused on a document drawn up in the period of Leonid Kuchma’s semi-autocratic presidency. The fact that this 2005 Action Plan was presented as Brussels’ reaction to one of the most mass-scale civil disobedience actions in postwar Europe illustrated inability of that-time European policy to adequately react to crucial historic events.

The EU reacted, albeit very belatedly, to the November-December 2004 events in 2007, when it began to draw up, together with Ukraine, a detailed Association Agreement which provides for an extensive free trade area. Initialed in 2012, the agreement, which calls for both political association and long-term economic integration of Ukraine into the European market, is perhaps the biggest agreement that the EU has ever concluded with a non-member state.

However, there still is no clear prospect of EU membership for Ukraine either in the text of the 2012 agreement or in the European Council’s statements of the past few years. And Germany bears a part of responsibility for this. This oversight was caused not only by the sluggishness of the EU political bureaucracy, but also by a rather skeptical attitude of some European elites to the idea of Ukraine’s accession to the EU. Maybe, a major role is being played in this case by psychological factors, which is partly easy to understand, taking into account numerous oddities in Ukrainian domestic policies and the more and more clumsy behavior of the Ukrainian leadership on the international arena.

Yet the political research of international European organizations in the past few years has proved convincingly that a tentative proposal of likely EU membership is very important for successful transformations in transition-period post-communist countries. Besides, when Turkey was recently granted the status of an EU membership candidate with an unclear future, this created a precedent for canceling the automatism that has so far existed between the membership prospect (and even the status of a candidate) and eventual accession to the European Union.

Against this background, it is unlikely that a certain deliberate collective decision in Germany’s corridors of power is the main cause of the relative passivity of the German policy towards Ukraine’s European prospects. In all probability, the crucial factor here is lack of attention to Ukraine and failure of Germany’s political elite to understand Ukraine’s geopolitical importance. This naivety is in turn connected with the continuing domination of Russia in the overall vision of Eastern Europe which has been shaped in the minds of German political decision-makers. In spite of the above-quoted statements of Schaeuble and a number of similar comments in Germany’s other political camps, there have been very few changes, if any, in the basic priorities of the German Eastern policy and its fixation on Moscow after the breakup of the Soviet Union, even though there is an absolutely different geo- and domestic political situation in Eastern Europe today in comparison with 1991 and an increasingly skeptical public opinion about Russia.

In collaboration with its European partners, Germany should support stronger than before the consolidation of Ukrainian statehood. At the same time, it should try not to irk the Kremlin too much with such actions and is hence obliged to continue cooperating with Moscow. It is hardly possible to take this kind of “equilibristic” approach always harmonically, which may result in a greater or lesser alienation between Berlin and Moscow. And this would be a matter of regret.

But, after all, it is the current leadership of Russia that bears the main responsibility for these complications. If, with due account of its serious domestic problems, Russia dropped its dubious great-power claims and mindless rivalry with the West for the former Soviet republics, Germany and the EU would not have the dilemma in question. A West-oriented Ukraine would not be a thorn in the side of a pro-European Russia – on the contrary, it would be a bridge for its ally. Moreover, the Ukrainian elite would be much less anti-Russian and, maybe, even interested in closer cooperation with Moscow if the latter were taking a more friendly attitude to Brussels and Washington. Not only Ukraine, but also Russia might be striving for political association and comprehensive free trade envisaged in the initialed EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. In that case most of the disputable issues in relations between the two fraternal nations and the related deadlocks in the relations of Moscow with Germany and other Western states simply would not exist.

In the past 20 years, very different Ukrainian governments have prevented, for a number of reasons, Germany and the West as a whole from taking a clear-cut attitude to and actively cooperating with Ukraine. President Kuchma practiced the so-called multi-vectored foreign policy which left open the question of where exactly Ukraine was marching. In 2005 to 2010, an aggravated confrontation between the Presidential Administration and the Cabinet put up an obstacle to a more effective cooperation between Ukraine and all its foreign partners, including Germany. Since President Yanukovych came to power in February 2010, the main problem in the relations between Ukraine and the West has been the ever-increasing undermining of the essentially weak democratic institutions and the rule-of-law state. The sad political regress has been paralyzing for several months the political and economic relations between Ukraine and the West and hindering the signing of the initialed EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.

In spite of these and many other problems, Germany and the West as a whole ought to take a more favorable attitude to Ukraine. Firstly, the current authoritarian tendencies in Ukraine are not so strong as in most of the other post-Soviet states. Secondly, the history of Ukrainian politics in the past 20 years has been more variable compared, for example, with the history of Russia or Belarus. Particularly, Ukrainian politics have seen several waves of upsurges and rollbacks. This allows presuming that the pendulum will soon swing in the other direction – towards a new democratization. Destabilization of the semi-authoritarian Yanukovych regime seems to be just a matter of time. But will this make real changes in the relations between Brussels and Berlin, on the one side, and Kyiv, on the other? With due account of Ukraine’s continuing marginal status, this question remains open on the mind map of West European – including German – elites.

Andreas Umland is a historian and a political scientist, editor-in-chief of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society”(www.ibidem-verlad.de/spps.html), and member of the Institute for Central and East European Studies (ZIMOS) at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Upper Bavaria. Since 2010, an Associate Professor at the Political Science Department of the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and member of the Valdai International Discussion Club, Moscow